Before the 2016 election, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller regularly emailed Breitbart News editors. The Southern Poverty Law Center evaluated more than 900 of those correspondences. SPLC’s investigative analysis of those messages that reveal Miller’s alignment with white nationalist thought and far-right extremism.

SPLC has run a series on Stephen Miller's white nationalism, the latest of which was published yesterday. Here are links to the main articles out so far.

• Stephen Miller’s Affinity for White Nationalism Revealed in Leaked Emails

In this, the first of what will be a series about those emails, Hatewatch exposes the racist source material that has influenced Miller’s visions of policy. That source material, as laid out in his emails to Breitbart, includes white nationalist websites, a “white genocide”-themed novel in which Indian men rape white women, xenophobic conspiracy theories and eugenics-era immigration laws that Adolf Hitler lauded in “Mein Kampf.”

• Miller Pushed Racist ‘Camp of the Saints’ Beloved by Far Right

Miller flagged “The Camp of the Saints,” a book popular among white nationalists and neo-Nazis, to the conservative website on Sept. 6, 2015, when he was an aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
“The Camp of the Saints” by Jean Raspail first came out in France in 1973, and the novel gradually gained popularity among extremists for its fictionalization of the “great replacement” or “white genocide” myth.

• Emails Detail Miller’s Ties to Group That Touted White Nationalist Writers

Miller shows ties to the think tank Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). CIS researchers say the White House has invited them into policymaking discussions. The White House and CIS did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this Hatewatch report. The SPLC began listing CIS as an anti-immigrant hate group in 2016. Since then, others have raised questions about the way the group’s analysts choose to portray immigration in a negative light. In an August article in The Washington Post, CIS tried to distance itself from a far-right attack in El Paso, Texas, responding to criticism that the organization and the young shooting suspect shared similar viewpoints on immigration.

• Miller Turned to Breitbart to Promote Political Agenda

Miller emailed then-Breitbart News editor Katie McHugh a post from conservative pundit Mickey Kaus criticizing Marco Rubio’s GOP presidential run on Feb. 6, 2016, a little less than two weeks after joining Donald Trump’s campaign, saying someone needed to aggregate the piece for the site. Aggregation in journalism happens when writers turn other outlets’ stories, opinion pieces or social media posts into new stories for their publications. Hours later, Breitbart published an article headlined “Mickey Kaus: Marco Rubio Hides Pro-Donor Amnesty Behind Anti-ISIS Bluster.”

Miller viewed the highly trafficked Breitbart as a way to promote his nativist, anti-immigration policies and to attack political enemies before millions of readers. And, while politicians and their staff commonly seek to influence news coverage, the dynamic on display in Miller’s emails to Breitbart suggests the conservative outlet was “not playing by the same rules that legitimate news organizations play by,” said Kyle Pope, editor-in-chief of the Columbia Journalism Review.